Sun open storage slashed till Saturday

Sun, about to be happily digested by ardent wooer Oracle, is offering a 40 per cent plus discount on its Open Storage 7000 system, but only until 26 September.

The first quarter of Sun's 2010 fiscal year ends on September 28, and it looks like an attempt to get a spike in 7000 sales by the end of the quarter. Sun's sales plummeted in the previous quarter.

The company has sent out an e-mailshot - we've seen one from a US contact - that says:

If you've purchased a storage appliance lately you may get the impression that a high performance solution can't come in a simple, cost effective package. Sun would like to prove that wrong by introducing you to the Unified Storage 7000 series. These machines are easy on the wallet, highly reliable and a breeze to install. And until September 26th, we're offering Sun customers more than 40 per cent off these systems that redefine the economics of data storage.

If you're not sure then you "you can download and manage a virtual Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System on your laptop or desktop (which) allows you to exactly simulate a Sun Storage 7000 series box".

Coincidentally, Sun has just updated the Open Storage 7000 product. There is enhanced iSCSI SAN support and a boost in performance for Oracle databases (there's a surprise). Forty Gbit/s InfiniBand is supported and new controller CPUs deliver 30 per cent additional performance through up to 24 cores and improved system bandwidth, along with doubled DRAM cache at 512GB.

Sun is offering Triple-Parity RAID, saying it's "the first major storage vendor to offer robust data protection from as many as three drive failures". Sun says it's also "the first and only major NAS storage vendor to offer Triple Mirroring".

There is a new Shadow Data Migration feature that allows customers to migrate data from competitors' NAS devices, plus iSCSI management and features enhancements to improve provisioning of server and storage systems.

Sysadmins can now manage their Sun Storage 7000 Systems using the Microsoft Management Console. ®